A Reflection: On What Is Past, or Passing, or to Come
Thursday afternoon I accidentally turned on to the White House ceremony awarding Presidential Medals of Freedom to, as it happened, 17 individuals. It was both a moving and a cautionary experience.
Dorothy Parker once wrote a theater review in which she said that the lead actor “ran the gamut from A to B.” In that spirit, among the honorees of this event were: John McCain (presented to his widow Cindy, President Biden’s Ambassador to the United Nations–I’d love to see the confirmation vote on that one–he as it happens having introduced her to his colleague. I kid you not.); Megan Rapinoe; Diane Nash, 1961 co-founder of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; retired Brigadier-General Wilma Vaught, the first woman at every rank of the Army she attained, who exchanged salutes with her Commander-in-Chief; a variety of religious readers, including an “activist nun” who would not be approved of by a variety of priests or bishops; Nurse Sandra Lindsay, who volunteered to be the first American to receive the Covid-19 vaccine; retired Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming (perhaps as a shout-out to Liz Cheney, sitting in the audience), warmly hugged by Biden, as phrases like “consensus-building” and “across the aisle” rang out; Raúl Yzaguirre, one time President of the National Council of La Raza; Gabby Giffords…
Enough. You get the idea: every box checked (except, too typically, Asian-Americans). It was the only thing these days that could bring a smile to the President’s face: a Last Hurrah for the myth and sometime reality of liberal democracy: diversity, tolerance, egalitarianism.
By sheer coincidence (I’ve read enough mysteries to know that any cop would scoff at that word) later that evening we watched on DVD a 1993 movie titled simply Gettysburg. We’d never heard of it, despite the fact that it’s an excellent movie with a terrific cast and what look like authentic battle scenes; and I’d bet that you haven’t either. We always wanted to get to that Battlefield, a major tourist attraction, but somehow never managed it.
Yet it is the Battle that decided the fate of the nation: the foundation of the Second American Republic that Abraham Lincoln envisaged; and that freed the slaves. Together with the landing at Omaha Beach and the Battle of Stalingrad, it’s one of the battles that determined the shape of the Centuries to come: and thus our lives as well.
How, and Why?
On July 1, 1863, General Robert E. Lee led the Army of Virginia, 70, 000 strong, up the Chambersburg Pike into Pennsylvania, toward the little town of Gettysburg. His plan was nothing less than to win the war and preserve the Confederacy and slavery. The idea was to lure the somewhat larger Army of the Potomac, now garrisoned around Washington D.C., into a pursuit that would lead it into a fatal ambush that would throw it into disarray and cause it to flee in retreat.
The town was surrounded by hills, beyond which a road stretched South-Eastward. Precisely 85.6 miles down that road lay the Capitol and its bridges across the Potomac: a forced march of at most two days for the army and its heavy artillery, into a Capitol that would now be totally undefended. The Government, including the President, would be arrested–or worse.
But the Plan went awry. While the Rebels were marching, a small contingent of the Union force arrived at Gettysburg, looked the site over, and seized the high ground, where they entrenched themselves. (Their foresighted leader, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, would later become Governor of Maine and President of Bowdoin College.) The Confederate field commander, General Longstreet, counselled caution, but Lee was undeterred, another forward contingent having been routed by his advance force. On the outskirts of the town, the bloodiest battle in the history of the U.S. began; approximately 53,000 men would be killed, many more suffering battlefield amputations.
Over three days, the decisive encounters centered on two points: first, a rocky hillside known as Little Round Top, where the Feds (as they were known) under Chamberlain survived, and repelled the attack with an almost suicidal bayonet charge, after running out of ammunition. On the morning of the final day, July 3rd, the entire remaining Rebel troops attacked in force after laying down heavy artillery barrages; only to discover that Union artillery had itself arrived.
The Confederate generals, though not Longstreet, who was constantly overruled by Lee, predicted that the conscript troops of the Union would turn tail and run after their first exposure to heavy fire and against overwhelming odds. Their goal was the second point of significance: a grassy knoll at the end of a field up a mile-long gentle slope, to be known forever as Cemetery Ridge.
Beyond that knoll, in a small grove of trees, the heavily outnumbered Unionists, now however backed up by their own artillery, waited lying or crouched behind an improvised stone fence, as the entire Rebel Army charged across that field in wave after wave (what is now known, unfairly, as Pickett’s Charge), only to be repelled by concentrated fire and sometimes hand to hand combat–from the Union troops who held their ground through the entire bloody morning, and never turned tail. It was the Rebels who finally retreated, as the Army of the Potomac finally reached its goal. The Capitol and the Government had survived. The war would drag on for two years, with more great loss of life, but it was effectively over.
A few months later, on November 19, 1863, President Lincoln took a short train-ride to Gettysburg for the Dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery. It’s a short speech of 272 words, easily memorized. I never get past the lines, “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”He concluded with his hope for a democracy “that shall not perish from the earth.” The Second American Republic.
It’s easy to be negative about the history of this nation; sometimes it seems that every day a new injustice comes to light. But then, so do reforms or even eliminations of injustice, and they build on each other–or have seemed to do so. Only a few years ago, the sudden achievement of gay marriage felt like a watershed. As individuals, most if not all of us have participated when we can in one or more of the struggles–“hills to climb” in Amanda Gorman’s words–that have defined the Second Republic. In any endeavor, you win some you lose some. Can’t be otherwise.
But all that is, in Yeats’s words, “what is past, or passing…” But about what is “to come,” there’s a cold chill in the air that is something new, in my life at least. I’m going to conclude with two quotations. The first is from “The Conflict,” a 1930’s poem by C. Day Lewis (father of Daniel Day, who played Lincoln in the excellent film of that title). I’m reprinting just the first and last stanzas:
“I sang as one
Who on the tilting deck sings
To keep their courage up, though the wave hangs
That shall cut off their sun.
…..
Move then with new desires,
For where we used to build and love
Is no man’s land, and only ghosts can live
Between two fires.”
The second quotation (called to my attention by Robert Kuttner in the NYROB), is from the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci:
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Indeed.
My next post is going to be on the subject that I’m sure is on everyone’s mind: “What should we do” in response to “What is to come?”
